Posts categorized "Other Perspectives on Change"

I run a bimonthly network meeting for senior OD practitioners in central London. At a recent session, we were each invited to write a brief narrative on an experience that had struck us in some way and which had left some residual feelings and/or recollections that might merit further exploration. We were then asked to reflect on this personal narrative, both ourselves (as we were reading it out loud to a couple of other participants) and those others who were listening to our recollection of the event from an ‘external’ perspective. In this sort of mini learning set, we then talked about what we had heard during the retelling of our story, as part of a process that session leaders Douglas Board and Rob Warwick call "immersed reflexivity"1.

My ‘striking moment' concerned a meeting that I had attended some weeks earlier in support of another independent consultant. Our aim had been to secure a contract with a major organization in the UK. Although the meeting itself was an awkward affair, with the client director exhibiting some behaviour which suggested that any resulting work would be somewhat of a challenge, the initial response was positive. By that I mean that we were asked to design and deliver the first event of a number that we had proposed for the project team, line managers and the Board. As we left, though, we shared our concerns about what, despite the outcome, had been a very unsatisfactory affair. I felt in particular that the main client didn’t ‘get’ what it was that we were proposing – and that he didn’t appear particularly interested in exploring anything beyond the mechanics (timing, attendees, reporting back, etc) of the initial workshop. These were issues that we agreed needed to be confronted sooner rather than later.

Much of the current writing on organizations adopts the language of systems thinking - although what this means in an organizational context differs considerably from writer to writer. And management theorists and practitioners are not alone in viewing organizations in this way. Journalists, politicians, inquiry chairmen, and other commentators regularly refer to "the system", or "systemic failure" when pronouncing on events that hit the headlines. So seeing organizations as systems, which have the capacity to act in some way separately from the actions of ordinary people, appears natural and straightforward. But is it?

The issue

From an informal coalitions/complex social process perspective, what people think of as an organization comprises people interacting together for a purpose - or, more accurately, for a diverse range of purposes. Some of these are explicit, seen as organizationally legitimate and openly acknowledged. Others are implicit and/or covert. Some are mutually supportive. Others are in conflict. As people interact from moment to moment, both in conscious pursuit of these several purposes and habitually, various formal artefacts (such as policies, strategies, structures, processes, procedures, and the like) are constructed, named, and announced, before being interpreted, drawn upon, adapted, or ignored by others. The characteristic patterning of people’s thinking and acting (often reified as "the culture") similarly emerges from this same conversational process.

Organization (or rather the ongoingprocess of organiz-ing) is therefore an act of co-creation between human beings in the normal course of their everyday interactions. And this process is in constant flux. In other words, the reality of organization is being continuously (re-) constructed in the currency of people’s present-day interactions: A dynamic network of self-organizing conversations, which does not respect boundaries – whether those implicit in the notion of a formal organization or others which define the supposed limits of this or that "system".

Judging by comments made in many on-line and real-world exchanges, though, this conversational construction of organization seems to present two fundamental difficulties for those who see, think and talk of organizations in "systems" terms.

I never expected to be writing a post in Informal Coalitions based on the words of the Archbishop of Canterbury. But yesterday morning I caught a snippet from Justin Welby’s first Easter sermon, as this was being reported upon during an early-morning radio programme.

It was the following extract that particularly caught my attention:

"I wonder how many people here think that the future will be better than the past, and all problems can be solved if we put our minds to it. There is a general sense that if that is not the case then it ought to be, and someone must be doing something to stop it. Illusion is replaced by disappointment, both wrong.

The hero leader culture has the same faults. A political party gets a new leader and three months later there is comment about disappointment. An economy suffers the worst blow in generations with a debt crisis and economic downturn, and the fact that not everything is perfect within fiveyears is seen as total failure. Complexity and humanity are ignored and we end up unreasonably disappointed with every institution, group and policy, from politicians to NHS, education to environment [my emphasis]."

It struck me that these words of the new head of the Anglican Church provide a much needed ‘reality check’ on the widely held assumptions about how things happen in organizations and wider society. Assumptions, for example, that there is a ‘right answer’ to all of the problems that we face; that ‘doing things better and getting them right’ is all that’s needed to realize the desired future; and, most pervasive, that our fate hinges on the actions of a few ‘special’ individuals.

Over the years I’ve had an aversion to the use of the adjective "soft" to describe anything associated with the dynamics of organizations.

Most particularly, the use of the term "soft skills" to describe the people aspects of leadership capability tends, in my experience, to subordinate these in some managers’ minds to what they see as the ‘real work’. More importantly from an informal coalitions perspective, the association of 'the people side of organization' with what is often dismissively referred to as the "pink and fluffy" stuff means that the very fundamentals of organizational dynamics – the complex social process of human interaction – get lost.

This process is far from ‘pink and fluffy’. It is power-laden and political. It involves the coming together of people with differing and often competing interpretations, interests, ideologies, and identities. Much of the process takes place informally, ‘in the shadows’ of the formal structures, systems and procedures. And it is influenced by taken-for-granted patterns of assumptions that have arisen over time as a result of past sense-making-cum-action-taking interactions. All of these factors, and others, arise because organisations are dynamic networks of people interacting with each other. So it seems to me that an understanding of these dynamics, and how they impact upon business change and performance, should be at the heart of HR practice. Sadly, it isn’t.

"Soft power" exercised through coalitional activity

So what about the notion of "soft power"? Mark McKergow has identified this as one of the central characteristics of "Host Leadership" that he advocates in his related website, and about which I blogged earlier. Is this similarly tainted by the use of the adjective "soft"?

In the paper, Wiebe reports on his exploration of the relationship between time and organizational change. His insights are based on narrative analysis of the stories of a number of managers who were ostensibly involved in the 'same', formally imposed organizational change. He found that their conception of time and the change process differed in a number of important ways and also departed significantly from the notion of time as objective, linear (past-present-future), and a-contextual.

Conventionally, time tends to be spoken about in matter-of-fact terms (what Wiebe calls "clock time"). As such, it is thought to provide a seemingly objective measure of progress against a defined programme of work. The latter is typically presented as the means of 'closing the gap' between what's seen as today's "as is" reality and tomorrow's "to be" intentions - both as formally defined.

However, Wiebe's basic proposition is that, "... managers temporally make sense of their experiences of change, actively configuring the relationship between the past, present and future in different ways." As a result of this, he further suggests that managers also construct the change and their enactment of it in different ways. And, to illustrate this, he identifies five distinct 'worlds' of organizational change in managers' narratives that reflect these differences.

In the mid-1990s, the BBC broadcast a series of six half-hour programmes entitled Sid’s Heroes. This featured workers from a range of organizations (the “heroes”) who had been challenged to improve the effectiveness of a central aspect of their work, using techniques introduced in two-day workshops by management consultant Sid Joynson. Sid suggested that a 30% increase in productivity was readily achievable in the chosen processes. And, based on the evidence of the shows, his confidence was well-founded.

Sadly, on a couple of occasions, crass comments by managers in response to the workers’ findings undermined the work that had been done. But Sid’s insistence that “the experts” in relation to the work processes were in the room with him, not in the management offices, was well demonstrated. I recall trying to buy a copy of the series from the BBC – on VHS(!) – but it was never made available for purchase.

In the previous post, I commented on Leandro Herrero's latest book Homo Imitans, which provides further insights into his Viral ChangeTM approach to organizational change. As I stated in my review, I agree with many of the things in it. For example, I share Herrero’s insistence that change doesn’t happen unless and until people ‘do’ things differently (although what constitutes “doing” might be up for debate). In Informal Coalitions, I also echo the importance he places on peer-to-peer influence; the powerful dynamics of organizational (i.e. social) networks; and the need for a different view of the leadership task (although, again, we might differ on what that different view might be). I wholeheartedly agree, though, how easily the momentum for change can be derailed where managers insist on applying the full panoply of textbook ‘tools and techniques’ to ‘manage’ the process. Herrero cites such things as formal, spreadsheet-based reviews; KPIs to measure the extent of interaction; bonuses for the “change agents” (who sit at the heart of his Viral ChangeTM methodology); and so on, as sure-fire ways to undermine the process. Amen to that.

Crucial differences

So, there is much about Herrero’s description of “Viral ChangeTM in action” that meshes with my own informal coalitions perspective. At the same time, there are some important differences that I want to highlight.

A brief look at Leandro Herrero’s latest thoughts on his Viral ChangeTM approach to orchestrated social change.

Early in 2008, I set out my thoughts on Leandro Herrero’s book Viral ChangeTM (here). Much (though not all) of his thesis on ‘how change happens’ resonates with my own informal coalitions view of organizational dynamics. In his latest book, imaginatively titled Homo Imitans, Herrero further emphasizes his view that social copying and social imitation (hence “Imitans”) can play a powerful role in an orchestrated approach to organizational (and wider social) change.

Homo Imitans is a good read. Herrero presents his arguments in a way that successfully marries some challenging propositions and background research with a conversational style. It is far removed from the superficial ‘one-minute-management’ genre of books. But it is also highly accessible. And it’s easy to see how adoption of the approach could itself become infectious – after all, I’m blogging about it here! At the same time, there are some differences between Viral ChangeTM and informal coalitions that I feel are important. But I want to address those in a forthcoming post. Here, I want briefly to outline the content of Homo Imitans and attempt to draw out some of Herrero’s main points.

The fundamental proposition of the book is that “the only change is behaviour change” and that this is brought about primarily through people copying the behaviours of others. It is through this process, according to Herrero, that cultures are formed and that change is achieved. People become ‘infected’ with new ways of behaving as they imitate the behaviours of influential others in their social networks. Importantly, from the perspective of Viral ChangeTM, this process can be orchestrated to bring about specific outcomes.

After a long but unavoidable gap, this post returns to the review of my 1980 paper on the planning task in organizations. The aim of the series is to establish to what extent – if at all – the view of organizational dynamics embodied in the paper reflects that contained in Informal Coalitions. And, if so, what inferences might be drawn from it in relation to the facilitation of organizational change (see Footnote).

Here the focus moves to the nature of decision making and action taking in organizations.

"The idea of a plane outside the world on which to stand has become a fundamental myth of our culture. The myth has most often taken the form of a spectator view of knowledge – the notion that we can stand aside from the action and comment upon it from a detached viewpoint."

Yesterday afternoon, I attended an excellent meeting in London, at which Roffey Park’s Liz Finney and Carol Jefkins shared the output of their research into the evaluation of OD interventions (copies can be purchased here). Their work provides a thorough review of current thinking and practice in this aspect of organisation development. The research is presented in an easily digestible form. And the authors offer practitioners a "toolkit" of potential interventions to evaluate the conduct and impact of their work.

But is their prescription credible in the complex world of organizational dynamics?